


A Dearth of Softness

by 9_of_Clubs



Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: A lot of clashing ensues, And Steve and Tony can't stay away post-snap, Angst, Black Panther Shuri (Marvel), Bucky and Steve were together pre-snap, But there are no hugs, Emotional Hurt, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Queen Shuri, Shuri misses her family, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony in Wakanda, Winter Panther Shield if you want it, and why wouldn't you, only pain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-11-29 12:32:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18223202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/9_of_Clubs/pseuds/9_of_Clubs
Summary: In the aftermath of the snap, survival leaves its marks.--“Just because you’re the Queen-“ Which was the wrong thing to say, Steve thinks idly, because it may as well have been,just because you’re alone.“Just because you are careless.”And Steve knows they aren’t even talking about this lab anymore, that they never are, like this in a rage, that this is just what happens when the pain bubbles up too loud and has no outlets. When they get infuriated with loss.Just because you are disloyal.He imagines she’d say to him.





	A Dearth of Softness

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the universe of ["In the After,"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17018544) but stands alone.

It’s a bad day, one of thousands they’ve had so far, one of millions more that are to come, striking without warning as most of their bad days do... Not that there are ever any good ones.  
  
Shuri had snapped at Tony, over something, over nothing, about a careless comment, an aggravating intrusion, maybe about a piece of tech he’d touched, maybe about the way he’d touched Steve, and both their voices had erupted, fuses short, hair triggers pressed, racing louder and angrier in endless escalation. For Steve, the furor of syllable has turned into nothing more than meaningless sound, he should listen, should concentrate, but it’s so much easier to hear nothing at all.  
  
“Just because you’re the Queen-“ Which was the wrong thing to say, Steve thinks idly, because it may as well have been, _just because you’re alone_ .    
  
“Just because you are careless.”  
  
And Steve knows they aren’t even talking about this lab anymore, that they never are, like this in a rage, that this is just what happens when the pain bubbles up too loud and has no outlets. When they get infuriated with loss.  
  
_Just because you are disloyal._ He imagines she’d say to him, he imagines she’s wanted to but bites her tongue because she _is_ loyal. He can hear it still, sometimes, anyway, ebbing through her somewhere, and it’s as true in her heart as it would be if she said it out loud. Most things Shuri hisses out in pain are true.

If she could forgive Tony, which she can’t, because-  
  
Because she can’t.  
  
She’d see that they have that laughably in common.  
  
Bruce rises from his chair, ashen, and turns on his heel in silence, white and shaking, not even a door to slam here. Steve would apologize to him, should, but doing that, trying to defuse, to set right, to put in order is a labor that costs more than he has to give. There’s no order anymore, so there’s no point. Too unbearably difficult to keep calm these days for any of them, hard to be mindful, compassionate, to spare anything from the grief except the honed rage and the desperate exhaustion which drags them, him, from one day to the next, the faint imitation of hope that he clings to, which is dull and ugly and maimed, but he’d die without it, he’d just cease to be all at once, and he needs them, for that. Shuri and Tony.

Bruce is already an afterthought. There are only enough resources for survival.  
  
The cacophony floods around him.  
  
“So sorry I had the _audacity_ to not just suffocate in space, which I know would have been just peachy for yo-“  
  
“I invited you here. I am allowing you to remain, I-“  
  
“Oho.” Tony’s face has curled unpleasantly, and Steve hates that face, but there’s nothing in their relationship which gives him the right to tell Tony what to do with his face. “Got it.” He’s laughing a little, dark scrapes of sound and all teeth, his fingers fluttering into the air, gesturing in that restless, reckless way of theirs, but only a shadow of his old animation. “Genius too, you know? I know, old, but if you give me a minute, still got it.” He’s leaned back against the wall, all loose coils, ready to tense. “Holding the torch I see.” And his eyes are laughing on Steve and they burn like fire.

“Allowing me.” He repeats soft and Shuri’s face is clenched and tight, narrowed. “Your kingdom, right? Give all the orders? Allowing me to be here, allowing me in this damn country, into your lab, access to your tech. Maybe. Maybe that’s true. You _need_ me, but maybe it’s true. But you think.” His voice has lost some of the fake charm, which he’s too worn as a general rule to pull out all the way, but he tries, anyway, tries until it sands down again, sands down to this. To the hollow and horrible emptiness underneath. The same way they all wear down, falling to a grating whisper laced with fury. “You actually goddamn think, you’re allowing him to fuck me?” Tony’s gaze meets Shuri’s in the middle, and it makes Steve nauseous, all of it.  
  
Her shoulders have straightened, her jaw tilted up, and he sees the tears brimming at the corners of her eyes. He should say something, intervene, one way or another, but the words don’t come and she beats him to it.  
  
“Aren’t I?” She offers finally in that infuriating way of hers, a relic of that old self-assurance from a time before they were all put in their place, that way that he knows crawls right under Tony’s skin. She says it with the matter-of-fact certainty of being absolutely right.  
  
Tony splutters.  
  
“I hate to remind you of this, _Your Majesty_ , but your little pet project is -“  
  
“Do not finish that thought.”  
  
For a terrifying heartbeat, Steve’s pulse quickens and his mouth dries, the images threatening already to coalesce, a field, a battle, a sharp change in the wind, _Steve?_ , for a bruising gasp of breath, he thinks Tony is going to push back against that order, finish the unbearable sentiment just because he was told not to. Go somewhere that hurts in an unforgivable way.  
  
For a terrifying heartbeat, he looks like he really wants to, the unbearable words at the tip of his too sharp tongue, _gone, dust, dead,_ But in the end, he swallows them back, only sneers, avoids implosion, maybe, possibly, explosion, for them all. “I _am_ here.” It’s a grit of sound, ground out between teeth. “You can hate it, you can wish it had all gone some other way, but I’m here, and like hell am I going to let you, or anyone else-“  
  
Steve closes his eyes, blinks away the tears, tries to push away the burning in his throat, tries to find whatever it was that used to make anyone listen to anything he had to say at all and breathes out.  
  
“Enough.”  
  
There’s a silence that follows his pronouncement, two faces turned to look at him, waiting in equal parts anguish, anger, and need for him to come down on one side or the other. But he has nothing more to say than that. So begrudgingly he looks back, betraying nothing but exhaustion for a long moment before he’s heaved himself onto his feet.  
  
“We’ll try again tomorrow.” He murmurs to Shuri and she watches him, and there’s this ache in her, and it’s so familiar, and she’s so young in so many ways and it raises something buried, some quiet impulse to care that can never quite be severed. But there’s nothing he can do, nothing he can offer to make the tears stop, to bring back T’Challa, who would probably be able to swallow his grief long enough to hug her, or. or. or Bucky. Thinking the name is enough to sear pain through every last one of his cells. Bucky. Who would. Who would have changed everything for them both.

She looks at him, impassive for a long moment, and something drops a little in her anger, a hand to his shoulder squeezing and falling back.  
  
God, I miss him, he wants to sob.  
  
Tony watches silent.  
  
He turns to him instead.

“Come on.”

And the other follows, without a look back at Shuri, an intense, intent stillness in his bones until they’ve crossed the boundary out of the lab.  
  
Steve’s breath catches in his throat as Tony shoves him against the wall in one smooth movement, hand lingering between throat and shoulder, but falling to the latter in the end. He’s stronger than he used to be without the suit, or maybe Steve is just nothing but weak these days.  
  
“Thank you so very much for your show of endless support in there.” The snarl is gnarled, Tony is invasive, in his space, relentless. “Really piped up to make it seem like you give a damn.”  
  
He lets his eyes close and Tony’s hand on shoulder tightens, digs, fights for bruises that won’t last.  
  
“You seemed to have it handled.” He offers lowly back, maybe goading, a little mocking himself, because he’d rather fight and fuck than have this conversation.  
  
“Tell me now, then.” Tony’s voice is silkier suddenly, than it’s been in days, in years, maybe, for Steve, rope wrapping around his throat and strangling, pushing questions with answers he doesn’t want. “If she’d told you that she looked into the crystal ball of Barnes’s brain and this was just _killing_ him.” Tony is irreverent and he’s mean and he’s hurting, but only his own pain registers in Steve’s ear, his own hurts. “Would you have let that matter?”  
  
The silence deafens for an imperceptible stretch, Tony’s breaths are harsh, echo loud in the quiet. He could throw him off, he could walk away, but he stays, his own lungs barely moving as the moment strains, tightens against them both.  
  
When it seems like the pressure is too great, is he screaming? He feels like screaming, and he’ll just be ripped apart if he doesn’t move them somewhere, but maybe they can all just fly apart into the finer dust of their limbs and that would be better, he presses his lips open, forces his tongue to move.  
  
“We’re together, Tony, what the fuck more do you want?”  
  
Wound eyes slit up at him, they’re meeting for the first time for a second, they’re in the airport in Berlin across a divide, they’re in Siberia and Tony is on the ground. And Steve, Steve always hates himself, but all he can taste on his lips, all he can see behind his eyes, all he can feel at all is ash.  
  
He thinks Tony is going to slap him, for a breath, he wishes he would.  
  
But he’s gone instead.  
  
And Steve is alone.  
  
—  
  
She comes to him where he’s simply collapsed on the ground, her eyes are bloodshot and there’s no hint of any of that sparking life in her today. None of the girl who teased him mercilessly about every little thing, the way only little sisters can, who updated his suit, and his weapons, and his tech, most importantly his tech, _so he doesn’t have to moon so pathetically when you’re away,_  with a playful roll of her eyes, who corralled them where they couldn’t say no and forced them all to pose as she snapped picture after picture on her phone.  
  
_“Are you satisfied yet, Shuri?”_ T’Challa’s voice echoes fond in the emptiness around him, Bucky smiles from the nothing that exists in the floating particles of air, indulgent, and Steve leans against him, there’s a real grin on his lips.

He misses that, he misses them.  
  
She sits beside him.  
  
“I apologize.” Her voice is not the mask of regality, just tired and defeated, just like them all.  
  
He lets her take his hand.  
  
Somewhere in the hollowness, the comfort registers a little. Barely, but somewhere. He makes himself squeeze it, and she presses against him.  
  
He knows he’s crying again.  
  
“I did not -“ She starts. “He would not.” Another breath, and she repeats. “I apologize.”  
  
Steve nods, he knows, he knows she does, he can see the ache for Bucky mirrored right behind her eyes, he can see the burden of loneliness. Tony wants him to revert, to go all the way back to those days in the tower where everything was simpler, to forget this in between time and throw it away. Shuri clings to him _because_ they existed in it together, and no one else did. He loved the rest of her family in that place, and they loved him, they’re connected too in that way, and he exists in both incarnations.  
  
And really, he knows.  
  
Truly.  
  
They both want him to love them. Are looking for connection to cling to where most of the rest  have severed. But there’s barely anything in him that can love anymore. He loves them both, maybe, as best he can. Not enough for anyone.  
  
“I was angry.” The rage has drained now. “Sometimes he.” The silent, _sometimes you_ . “makes me angry.”  
  
Steve snorts at that, just a little pull of lip, a faint recognition at something that might once have bubbled laughter.  
  
“Yes.” He gives over, letting his shoulders slump. “He can be good at that.”  
  
She breathes, a steady inhale, a long exhale, pulls herself together.  
  
“He would not want you to be alone.” She says, soft, there’s a dearth of softness from them all, but she can still manage it sometimes, if she tries, she and Nat, on occasion, the last people who are gentle with him on this earth. He is grateful she doesn’t say Bucky’s name, and the tears prick heavier already. “My brother would not wish for it either. I do not wish for it myself - it is only that.”  
  
She breaks off, quieter now. “I miss them.” She murmurs the admission, and doesn’t tell Steve that it hurts her to see him with Tony, that it aches to feel in that way abandoned, when she has no balms for her grief at all. He is not strong enough to say it for her, so he tries to find her in this out she’s given, understanding in her constant wisdom, that this is what he has to offer. She won’t demand more from him outright.  
  
He squeezes one more time, curves her fingers in his. Small, he tries to ignore old memories of himself, stubborn, fighting, angry, that seem universes away now, lurking somewhere. It’s the universe’s abysmal sense of humor to leave them only with hot heads to push forward through this mess. Unable to stop burning each other as they look for balance.  
  
“Me too.”  
  
An admission he can’t make often, but he pushes himself to give now, an affirmation they both remember, that he hasn’t forgotten. How could he forget? But she needs it, and he needs it too maybe. Something quiets between them again.  
  
They sit.  
  
—  
  
Tony is there, in their bedroom, Tony’s bedroom, really, but Steve isn’t ever anywhere else.  
  
He’s a little surprised, if he’s honest, thought the silent treatment would endure longer, he’d certainly deserve it, but they don’t talk about things like that, don’t hash it out. Tony is there and he accepts it. If he hadn’t been, he’d have accepted that too.  
  
“Hey.” He throws out between them as he strips off his shirt, kicks off his shoes and slumps down onto the mattress. Pretending energy for anything else is futile.  
  
Tony turns to look at him, shows him the hurt for one more breath and then shutters emotion away completely, with a ghost of a smirk that widens. He knows Steve can see it happening. Steve knows he deserves to.  
  
He hates himself a little more, but it’s barely a twig on the inferno already burning.  
  
“Hey.” Tony gives back in that aggravating sing song tone he takes up these days, when he’s trying to be just perfectly fine. “Have a good afternoon, _sweetheart_ ?”  
  
Steve doesn’t answer, and a hand tilts his face up, a little rough and then they’re kissing, and that’s its own kind of hollow relief.  
  
_I hate you_ , he tastes in the kiss, but Tony is there and he can’t stay away, and neither can Steve.

So they don’t.

And they kiss, and maybe, for a minute, a minute that costs, they can just forget.

So they do. 


End file.
